How To: Take Notes Like a Champ

Information Overload

One of our newest projects here at thoughtbot is a taxonomic naming app called
GNITE which we’re building for the Marine Biological Lab.
As designer on this project my first challenge was to get a basic understanding
of the subject matter and the goals of the project, but I found the information
to be complicated especially for someone new to taxonomy. We had the pleasure of
visiting the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole, MA on Cape Cod recently and in
the meetings I dusted off an old note taking trick I frequently used in college
but with new tools —an iPad and Adobe
Ideas
app.

Taking notes vs. absorbing information

Design is often about reducing complex systems to their simplest form. Our
meetings at the Marine Biology Lab could have produced pages and pages of
comprehensive notes but my goal was to organically absorb as much information as
possible without the distracting task of transcribing information. Using Adobe
Ideas, an iPad and a
stylus,
I took visual notes, writing down key pieces of information, embellishing them,
and organizing them visually. The embellishment is the key part - it leaves your
ears open to what’s being discussed. When looking back at my notes I can clearly
remember who was talking, what the sentiment was, and other subtle things that
could be forgotten during normal note taking. The visual nature of the notes
jogs my memory in a way pure text or handwriting doesn’t. The outcome is an
understanding of a simplified gestalt which isn’t burdened by details.

Click each image to view it larger:

Adobe Ideas allows fractalesque zooming. You are able to use vast scale differences to
communicate importance as well as benefit from a very flexible canvas, so you
almost never run out of space taking notes.

Check out that mushroom! Someone said “fungi” so I drew a mushroom. As my theory goes, I absorbed whatever was said after that (it was an anecdotal tale of conflicting fungi names, I believe).

But won’t you miss important details

The drawback to taking notes like this is that many details will never get
written down. If those details are critical bring a voice recorder. In my case
there were two developers in the meetings as well, so I was confident our
team-like approach would yield all necessary information (and it did).

Life after NDA’s

One of the most exciting aspects to this project is it’s open source which opens
the possibility to documenting the building process in ways we usually can’t
with most client work. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of
posts documenting the design process all the way through to the final product.

Kevin Burg

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